A social solution to the problem of information hierarchies

Simo HÃ€mÃ€lÃ€inen — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:38:28 GMT

A social solution to the problem of information hierarchies

SIMO S. HÄMÄLÄINEN, student, University of Lapland, Finland

HELEN HEINMAA, student, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia

Many organisations deal with a large amounts of information. Much of the information is internal and stored in a shared filesystem on the intranet. Examples include policy documents, organisational information, contracts and internal documentation.

In traditional file storage, content creators and users organise information using filesystem hierarchies. Few aids exist in locating information quickly and reliably. Sometimes documents logically belong to several places in the hierarchy. As new directories are created, related documents may end up in different branches (do administrational documents on a techical project belong to the project or admin hierarchy?) Various versions of the same file may live in different locations, and keeping them synchronised is challenging. Creating documents involves traversing directories, creating documents, naming them, saving and then documenting their existence.

One proposed solution to this problem is semantic metadata, ie. documenting relationships between documents. Unfortunately this has proved not to work well. Organisations' internal information is often informal and spontaneous, and adding semantics is too difficult and time-consuming.

Replacing semantics with folksonomies provides a flexible alternative. Instead of accessing documents using directory hierarchies, all documents are accessed from various angles using tags. Content creators and users can freely tag documents with suitable keywords, and a search locates documents using these keywords.

Folksonomies are faster to use than hierarchies. Although informal, they have proved a powerful tool in organising large amounts of information. Users are becoming familiar with tags: from Twitter to Flickr, they're used to classify massive amounts of data.

Content creation must be trivially easy. Creating a document means clicking a "new document" button. This opens a WYSIWYG editor. There is no 'save' button: changes are automatically saved and become immediately available to the network. The system handles document revision control, so full change history of the documents is available.

Intelligent Social Information Feed

Juho Autio — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:51:37 GMT

As Industrial revolution and Information revolution are passed by, we are experiencing the Social Media Revolution. In the Industrial and informational revolution it was the new technology that revolutionized social and economic fields. Right now, the human-like social-wise knowledge has taken over.

Knowledge is what matters when it comes to the modern organization. The company needs to know it’s cababilities to produce value. The concept of information feed is very typical of social media. In business use we must concentrate on creating a feed that really provides value.

I propose a concept of intelligent social information feed, that revolutionizes the workflow of a knowledge organization (which, in my opinion, is any company now). To really make a business concept that is manageable we mustn’t focus too much on technological details, but shape up a process. The process will be controlled and refined, making the company more efficient thanks to improved knowledge utilization.

The process should contain at least the following main activities: production, enrichment, routing, control and feedback. Production activity mainly consists of input by people and internal or external systems. The enrichment and routing phases are very important from the business perspective, because their motivation is providing only information that is highly concetrated and matters to the recipient.

Enrichment and routing of information should be carried out using machine learning, data mining, semantic reasoning and even pure artificial intelligence techniques, revised by human administration. Control and feedback partly overlap with the former activities, because they are regulative by nature.

To recap what social media has to do with this intelligent feed process – well, just everything! Social media provides a collaborative way of managing information, where people appear as persons with emotions, common sense and judging ability.

Real-Time Economy Community - New ideas

A social solution to the problem of information hierarchies

Intelligent Social Information Feed